Research and Resources

Studies & Articles

The Atlantic: Why Grades are not the key to achievement (6/2017) An interesting teaching ‘experiment’ concludes that the intrinsic love of learning supplants the drive for high marks in the long run.Read the full article

NY Times: How do we educate people for an automated world? (3/2017) As our world becomes more and more automated, schools continue to play an important role in preparing children for the ever-changing dynamic work world. The most important skill to learn is how to learn. “Many of the ‘skills’ that will be needed are more like personality characteristics, like curiosity, or social skills that require enculturation to take hold,” wrote Stowe Boyd, managing director of Another Voice, which provides research on the new economy.marks in the long run.

Quora: A Stanford dean on adult skills every 18-year-old should have (4/2016) Originally appeared in book by Julie Lythcott-Haims, NYT bestseller How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success (Henry Holt & Co., 2015) Former Stanford dean shares the life skills that are necessary to be successful in college years and beyond.Read the full article

Newsweek: Age 5 is Too Late: Public Schools Must Focus on Early Learning (8/7/16)
“Scientific research into brain development and the optimal learning window from zero to age 5 is conclusive. The quality of care and experiences during the early years of life literally sets the stage for all future interactions and ability to learn. I don’t want to say after age 5, it’s all downhill, but the quality of care and experiences before age 5 determines if the child will have an up-hill battle or a smooth road entering school.”Read the full article

New York Times: What Babies Know About Physics and Foreign Languages (7/30/16)
“New research tells us scientifically what most preschool teachers have always known intuitively. If we want to encourage learning, innovation and creativity we should love our young children, take care of them, talk to them, let them play and let them watch what we do as we go about our everyday lives.”Read the full article

The Washington Post: Once all but left for dead, is cursive handwriting making a comeback? (7/26/16)
The cursive comeback is championed by a mix of educators, researchers, parents and politicians who lament the loss of linked-letter writing and cite studies that learning cursive engages the brain more deeply, improves fine motor dexterity and gives children a better idea of how words work in combination.Read the full article

Forbes: The Future of Education Was Invented in 1906 (1/2014)
“In fact, the future of education was invented in 1906. That’s the year Maria Montessori, who was the first female medical doctor in Italy, opened her revolutionary school…Montessori education was so groundbreaking because it was the first (and, to my knowledge), scientific education method. By which I mean the following: every other education method is based on an abstract model of the child and then derives education methods from that. Maria Montessori, a doctor and a researcher, went the other way around: she experimented with methods and, based on the results, built up a theory of the child, which she then tested and refined through experiment.”Read the full article

Science Magazine: Evaluating Montessori Education (2006)
“On several dimensions, children at a public inner city school had superior outcomes relative to a sample of Montessori applicants…By the end of kindergarten, the Montessori children performed better on standardized tests in reading and math, engaged in more positive interactions on the playground, and showed more advanced social cognition and executive control.”Read the full article

National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector: Does it Work? What Research Says about Montessori and Student Outcomes (2003-2012)
“Montessori parents know first-hand how this approach to education supports and nurtures children’s development in all areas: physical, intellectual, language, and social-emotional. Scientific research confirms that Montessori children have an advantage not only academically, but also in social and emotional development.”Read the full article and links to research studies

The New York Times: Why Do Americans Stink at Math? (7/2014)
This article, though doesn’t mention Montessori by name, speaks to the benefits of a Montessori-type approach to teaching math. Here’s a sample of some of the article:
“Instead of having students memorize and then practice endless lists of equations — which Takahashi remembered from his own days in school — Matsuyama taught his college students to encourage passionate discussions among children so they would come to uncover math’s procedures, properties and proofs for themselves. One day, for example, the young students would derive the formula for finding the area of a rectangle; the next, they would use what they learned to do the same for parallelograms. Taught this new way, math itself seemed transformed. It was not dull misery but challenging, stimulating and even fun.”Read the full article

Harvard Business Review: Montessori Builds Innovators (7/2011)
“There are strident disagreements these days over every aspect of American educational policy, except for one. Everyone thinks it would be great if we could better teach students how to innovate.
So shouldn’t we be paying a great deal of attention to the educational method that produced, among others, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Jeff Bezos, Jimmy Wales, Peter Drucker, Julia Child, David Blaine, and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs? They were all students in Montessori schools. According to a Wall Street Journal article by Peter Sims, there’s a “Montessori Mafia” among the creative elite. So maybe there’s something to the method Italian physician Maria Montessori came up with around the turn of the 20th century.”Read the entire article

The Boston Globe: Succeeding at their own pace: The Montessori approach to education and some of its famous alumni have made great strides in recent years (8/2011)
“One of my favorite writers, Steven Levy, has published a new book about Google: “In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.’’ Cynics might call it a disguised ad for the cabinet of many wonders that is Google – as if the company needs promotion. It is also a heartfelt Valentine to the Montessori educational system, which, Levy writes, inspired the Google experience. You can’t understand Google unless you know that both Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] were Montessori kids,’’ one staffer tells Levy. “Montessori really teaches you to do things on your own at your own pace and schedule,’’ Brin says in the book. “It was a pretty fun, playful environment – like Google.’’Read the entire article

The Montessori Foundation: Montessori 101
Every year thousands of young children begin their education in Montessori schools around the world. Their parents ask, “Just what is this thing called Montessori?” Their questions are well founded, because Montessori schools are normally very different from the schools most of us attended when we were young.Read the entire article